Soured Milk Chocolate Cake
Most of the milk I consume is raw milk. This means that it has not been pasteurized. I buy it from small farms who keep their cows on grass. I like raw milk for a number of reasons – I like that the vitamins have not been destroyed from the heat of pasteurization (vitamins are added back into pasteurized milk, but why not get the real vitamins inherent in the milk?). Raw milk also contains beneficial enzymes and probiotic bacteria. Plus, I just like the taste better. So there are lots of reasons to drink raw milk.
Fresh raw milk is wonderfully sweet and delicious. At some point, it starts to sour. It differs from batch to batch (since it is a real food, not a food that has been packed full of stabilizers and preservatives, or cooked before refrigeration). But when raw milk starts to sour, it isn’t bad. Sour cream is, well, soured cream. I’ve made cream cheese from soured milk before. When pasteurized milk goes sour, don’t drink it!
Since I don’t want to drink a glass of soured milk or pour it over cereal, the question becomes, what do I do with it? I recently had a full half gallon sour on me since I didn’t drink any for about a week. I couldn’t bear to throw it down the drain, so I had to figure something to do with it. A half gallon is a lot, so I needed several ideas. This was one use for it – a chocolate cake made with soured milk! If you don’t have sour milk, or if you don’t have any raw milk, you can sour regular milk by adding a tablespoon of plain white vinegar or lemon juice to one cup of milk. I imagine that kefir, yogurt, or buttermilk would also work in place of sour milk.
The resulting cake is incredibly moist, light, and fluffy. It is chocolatey and sweet, but not overly so. Make, and enjoy!
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 1/2 cup sucanat, rapadura, or evaporated cane juice crystals
- 1/2 cup coconut oil
- 3 cups flour
- 1/2 cup cocoa
- 2 tablespoons baking soda
- 2 eggs
- 2 cups sour milk
Cream the sugars and coconut oil. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, cocoa, and baking soda. In a 3rd bowl, mix the wet ingredients together. Then alternating between the wet and the dry ingredients, add them to the oil/sugar mixture and mix until combined. Grease and flour a 9×13 inch pan and bake at 350 for 45 minutes.
This post is a part of Real Food Wednesdays.
Julie
on Apr 29th, 2009
@ 11:04 am:
looking forward to future posts on soured milk. we’ve switched to raw milk, but I’m super frustrated that ours sours so fast (after about 3 days!) My son is super taste/smell sensitive so he stops drinking it the fastest. Hubby and I can usually stomach one more day. I know raw is so good…but it is expensive
Meg
on Apr 29th, 2009
@ 11:46 am:
Oooh… this sounds good. Our goat is giving us a gallon and a half of milk a day, so I KNOW I’m going to be needing this recipe sometime soon!
Stacy
on Apr 29th, 2009
@ 12:15 pm:
Julie, that is too bad it sours so fast! I can usually get 5-7 days of sweet tasting milk before it sours. That is usually enough time for me to drink it all or use it in cereal. But it is good to have these recipes and ideas for the times when I can’t get to it fast enough.
Meg, how lucky you are to have a goat! I have another recipe queued up that would be delicious with goat milk!
Jeremy Warner MD
on May 6th, 2009
@ 11:11 am:
That’s a great use for soured milk – my grandmother passed down a recipe for sour cream chocolate cake that I’m sure was made from raw milk gone off in the days before pasteurization. Plus the baking will kill off the pathogenic bacteria. You should know that even cows kept on small farms will harbor certain strains of harmful bacteria which occur naturally – listeria, salmonella, mycobacteria. For this reason I currently recommend (along with the FDA and CDC) against consuming raw milk in uncooked form, unless it’s exceedingly fresh.
Stacy
on May 6th, 2009
@ 12:15 pm:
Hi Jeremy,
Thank you for your comment! Yes, if you cook raw milk (or soured raw milk) properly, any pathogens will be killed off. Of course the beneficial bacteria will be killed and enzymes will be denatured too. I purchase raw milk and I drink much of that raw milk, well, raw. Straight out of the fridge. I posted about how I know my farmer – I’ve met him, talked to him, etc. I am planning to visit the farm soon. Because of the kind of farm he has, I have little worry about the safety of the milk I consume.
A blog I love has a great post going over the benefits of raw milk, and talks about its safety as well. You can find that post here. An interesting point about the safety of raw milk is that milk (in any form) caused less food poisoning in 1997 than vegetables did! Even recently in the news, there have been pistachio scares, peanut butter scares, sprout scares, etc, and all very wide spread (affecting large regions if not the entire country), while no one who gets milk from any of the farms I get milk from have reported a single illness.
Everyone should make their own decision on what is best for them. I am an advocate of freedom of choice when it comes to milk. I’m glad that I can get it raw! But if you don’t want to drink it raw, that is ok.